BY SENAIT G/HIWOT
Days before my 26th birthday I discovered a deeper meaning to life. I realized I was defining myself all the time to some concepts in my mind and being unhappy… I realized I had taken the wrong way of finding self-worth and happiness by telling myself that I had to be confident all the time and to do this and that… I realized the more I told myself to be confident the more I felt like I lacked something.
A guy called Noah Elkrief on you tube made me realize that I am not my thoughts… that thoughts aren’t real… good or bad they are just circumstantial, not reality… i grasped this concept so easily and applied it to my life and found happiness and self-worth.
Elkrief made it clear to me that there is always a self-image we protect and that is why we are so afraid or skeptical of other people’s views towards our image… we protect it with all we have. What is self-image though… let’s break it down For me I had a self-image of Smart, Polite, Reserved, Confident, Beautiful, Rich, Kind, Observer Stressed, Judgmental, Awkwardly shy, Weak, Conservative and strong.
But aren’t there times when I was also the opposite of that YES there were….. so do these traits define me? No they don’t… see I am the awareness, consciousness, soul and I can’t be defined by thoughts of myself or other people… so that gives me the absolute freedom to be anything I want.
The other thing that Elkrief made clear for me was that what we think as Good or Bad are not actually true but circumstantial… what might be good for one person may be bad for the other…. So what is bad what is good?
Bad is usually understood as something that creates discomfort, pain, lack of pleasure but how do we know that is bad just because we experienced those emotions… what if those emotions make us better or give us a deeper meaning in life?
Good is usually defined as something that creates pleasure, satisfaction and comfort but how do we know that is good just because we experienced those emotions… what if those emotions end up harming us?
So we don’t know what is good and bad… all we know is reality and it changes all the time like night and day… we also physically change but something in us is always is there since we were born and that is consciousness or awareness and that is what we are.So should we worry about what others think or what we think about ourselves?
THOUGHTS DO NOT DEFINE US. GOD DOES!
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD 18 DECEMBER 2022
